With Billie (34 page)

The Lady Day Orchestra opened with some dance numbers for about forty-five minutes and then it was time for Billie to make her way to the bandstand, walking through the crowd that cleared a thin pathway for her. Maybe she was wearing the high-heeled, sling-back suede shoes that Pony Kane admired so much, the white flowers like a pool of light in her hair and her dress glittering as she moved.

The ones in the audience who knew Billie when she was
a young girl still called her Eleanor
^†
and she must have turned her head every time she heard the sound of her old name, looking to see what memories were brought flooding back by familiar faces from the past. ‘Hey, Freddie! You shut up and sit down!… Dee Dee, you motherfucker! You still working in that fucking fish market?… Where’s Diggs? Or can’t the bitch leave the pool table for long enough to come and see me?’

And then there she was, standing on a rough stage platform, without the luxury and solitude of a perfectly aimed pinpoint of pink light to follow her every step and to drive away the eyes of those who were watching her. The crowd surged around as close as possible to see this miracle of worldly success, who had been hatched out of their same nest of poverty and confusion.

She signalled to the orchestra that she was ready to begin. What was her first song of the evening? ‘I Cover the Waterfront’ perhaps, because this was a city where the ships came in from far-away places and sailors tumbled into the clubs and bars and whorehouses to spend their money and then slept off their exhaustion, lying like flotsam along the beach. As Billie’s cousin John Fagan said, ‘When she sang “On the Waterfront” [
sic
], it had a certain meaning for those of us who lived on the Point. The Point consists of an area which is south of Lafayette Street and it went all the way down to the waterfront. It was a very nice community to live in, even though we were poor. And this is the area she came from.’

The people who knew Billie before she left for New York could see that the years had moved on, and they could hear how her voice had gone slower and darker and was no longer that of a young girl. But her presence was as hypnotic as ever. She was singing the long introduction to that song about a woman whose sailor-lover has abandoned her, but still she waits and hopes for his return.

She might have followed with ‘Fine and Mellow’, and with the words ‘he wears high-draped pants, stripes are really yellow’, the image of Skinny ‘Rim’ Davenport in his fine suits and hats, and the many other pimps and hustlers she knew and ran around with, might float into her mind. All those men who had enjoyed her singing and her company and who had given her the freedom to be ‘one of the boys’ in return.

And then, turning to gaze at John Levy’s luminously pale skin, his unsmiling face and beetling black eyebrows, she could sing ‘My Man’, telling the world how she would ‘like to dream of a cottage by a stream … where a few flowers grew and perhaps a kid or two’, then explaining with the next verse that each time her dream is broken and her life returns to despair, when her man ‘gets hot and tells [her] not to talk such rot’. And always at the back of her mind as she was singing, she must have had racing thoughts about the money that was disappearing faster than she could earn it, and about this tour and Dewey Shewey and whether he had sorted out the promotion.

She sang into the hot night with the sound of the sea whispering beneath the sound of the music and people’s voices. And when the show was over, she and John Levy
must have made their way to the York Hotel, which was run by a man called Sammy and was the only black hotel in the whole city. Unless they had chosen to go to Tom Smith’s Hotel, but as Pony Kane said, that was only a ‘black rooming house, nothing fancy’.

Perhaps there was a lot more talking and drinking and quarrelling to be done before Billie was ready to sleep. Melba Liston said that John Levy had the idea that Billie would be able to break her heroin addiction in the South, simply because it would be hard to obtain the drug down there. But that meant she would need to drink very heavily to keep her nerves at bay and to keep going.

The following morning they were ready to set off, heading for the New Dance Pavilion on Carr’s Beach in Maryland. The next day they were booked to appear at the Pier Ballroom in Ocean City. Then they would go through Virginia, visiting the southern states that Billie had avoided since her days of touring with Count Basie and Artie Shaw.
^‡
They were also booked to appear at the Mosque Ballroom in Richmond, Virginia, the Highway Boxing Arena in Newport News, Virginia, and the Municipal Auditorium in Norfolk, Virginia. Then they were supposed go on down to North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana.

This was strictly segregated country and they were playing to all-black audiences. Melba Liston said they played a lot on a ferry that went ‘from one side of a lake to the other’, the bus containing all their equipment going back and forth with them. And they played in ‘barn-like’ ballrooms on the beaches and in dancehalls that were really tobacco warehouses, with tobacco leaves hanging from the high wooden beams and the air sharp from the pungent smell.

In order to transform some of these places for the night’s entertainment, they’d often just rope off a space for dancing
and then Billie would ‘do her stuff, doing what she did’. And if ever a few white people did turn up to listen because they had heard her records and were curious to see her, they were led to a specially cordoned-off white area, away from the rest of the audience.

Soon after the tour began, Dewey Shewey was arrested and carted off by the police, and it then became apparent that he had done nothing about advance planning or publicity.
^§
Very few bookings had been organised and no radio networks or local newspapers had been contacted. Sometimes Billie and John Levy would drive ahead to the next city to try to get things going, or Levy would attempt to make the necessary contacts on his own. But it was often too late and she would end up playing to a small crowd of shuffling strangers who had no interest in the Lady Day Orchestra and its unfamiliar northern music.

Gerald Wilson said that the band really enjoyed it when Billie travelled with them on the bus because she was ‘such a trouper’ and she made everybody laugh. He said they ‘all loved Billie enough to keep on trying, in the hope that the tour would turn successful’ although it was nothing but trouble from the moment it began.

As Melba Liston explained it, ‘We were all strangers down south, and the people didn’t take to us too good … We were playing black places, but we were foreign to them. It’s a territorial thing; northern blacks were something else to southern blacks, at least to the people we were playing for. We didn’t talk the same language.’

The Lady Day Orchestra was ‘kept together as a family’ by its own sense of isolation. The music they heard on the radio was ‘very slow, very sombre, very sad’ and even the records on the jukeboxes in the restaurants were quite alien. ‘We stayed together and played records together and jammed,’ said Melba. ‘We tried to be gay, but the music was so bad.’

As the only other woman on the tour, Melba Liston was
asked by John Levy to stay with Billie in her hotel room, to keep an eye on her and see nothing happened. ‘He would get nervous she wanted stuff and he didn’t want her to have it!’ And so this shy twenty-one-year-old woman, who ‘didn’t have any experience’ and who wasn’t used to what she called ‘night-life people’, did her best to reassure Billie and keep her calm.

Melba Liston remembered how Billie would wake up in the morning and ‘She wasn’t feeling too good. She’d cry a little bit … and then she’d have her coffee and sit up in bed and have her bourbon with it and talk a while.’ She talked about her childhood and the chaotic life she had lived in Baltimore, maybe with certain memories reawakened by the recent visit there. Melba said she didn’t understand half of what was being said to her, but it didn’t matter because ‘I thought she was really great. I loved her. Lady was an easy person to like because she was a very warm person; you couldn’t help it. If she liked you, she liked contact. I’d see her and she’d always hug me.’

Melba felt that the two of them were kindred spirits – one sad soul with another. She said that Billie called her ‘my little girl’ and tried to warn her against ‘getting messed up in life’. It was only later, looking back on this time, that she realised how for a while she became the daughter Billie had always longed for.

Although Billie was low-spirited, Melba Liston said she wasn’t ‘laid up or generally irritable.’ She kept going and kept on having fun. After the coffee and the bourbon and the tears, she’d get dressed, go out and walk around, and go to the restaurant. Then she’d often put some music on the jukebox and dance and persuade others to dance with her.

Melba Liston found the whole tour far too wild and frightening and did her best to keep out of trouble, hiding in a corner and reading her book. She was what she called a timid child and didn’t like violence. She tried to stay as far from John Levy as she could and was terrified when he and Billie quarrelled. She remembered how once they had a fight in the front of the bus and she was so afraid she hid
under a seat and crouched there, waiting for the storm to pass.

Billie was venting her fury at the whole mismanaged tour. She said she should never have agreed to come down south with the band, and she was sick of the whole thing and didn’t want her name associated with such a disaster. During one of her rages she managed to tear down the heavy roller blind on which the ‘Lady Day Orchestra’ was written and then she ripped it apart. As Melba Liston said, ‘Billie was strong … She had to be pretty strong to do that.’

There was another bad fight between Billie and John Levy in a hotel. Billie split his head open with a Coca-Cola bottle, while he managed to cut her with a knife. They were both taken to hospital, but Billie was ready to work that night. ‘It didn’t show on her,’ said Melba Liston.

The days were passing and there was hardly any money coming in. The Orchestra hadn’t been paid and neither had the bus driver. And then somewhere in the Carolinas – it was either Greensboro or Greenville – the bus driver announced that he had had enough and walked out on them, leaving them stranded on the bus.
^‖
At this point John Levy said he was going to fetch some money, so he disappeared too. According to Melba Liston, he took Billie with him, but in
Lady Sings the Blues
Billie maintains, ‘Mr Levy walked out and left me and my goddamn band stranded in the Deep South without a dime.’
^a

Whatever the real details of the story, it is certain that Billie disappeared and the entire Lady Day Orchestra of seventeen men and one woman was left stranded without a driver and without money, and with nowhere to sleep except on the upright seats of the bus. But it wasn’t just the discomfort that
Melba remembered. Every night a group of policemen would come and beat against the side of the bus with their long sticks, threatening that ‘if anything went wrong in the town, the guys were responsible’.

Melba Liston said the whole situation frightened her so much that ‘she was going to pieces’. But she was luckier than the others, because after three days she and Gerald Wilson somehow managed to get a train to Kansas City. From there she made her way home to the West Coast.
^b

The other members of the band waited another five days until the bus driver finally returned. He announced he was driving to New York, but although that was exactly where most of the men needed to go, he refused to give any of them a lift. And so they were forced to gather up their instruments and make the difficult journey north on their own. Some were able to wire their families to send money out; for others it was not so easy.

Although John Levy had arranged the whole disastrous enterprise and had agreed to be financially responsible, nothing had been put in writing and, when the tour collapsed, the blame and the cost fell on Billie. After all, it was her voice that had taken them along and it was her name that had made it all possible. A number of members of the orchestra felt they had no choice but to put financial claims against her for their loss of earnings and the extra expenses. As Gerald Wilson said when he was interviewed, ‘It was one of those things.’
^c

And so these debts and legal expenses were added to the mountain of debts and legal expenses that had accumulated ever since Billie was released from jail. Over the past two years she had earnt more than ever before and yet she had
nothing left to show for it. John Levy and Billie parted company, but he took much of her ‘collateral’ with him, including the house on Long Island. She was also committed, for weeks to come, to contracts that Levy had signed on her behalf.

In spite of the trauma of the tour, Melba Liston stayed close to Billie and said they used to talk on the phone maybe once or twice a year, just to catch up on news. They also bumped into each other occasionally, once Melba had moved back to New York in 1955. Their last meeting was at the airport in 1958. Melba was ‘going out some place’ with her agent and her all-women quintet and Billie was just coming in.

Melba said that even then, even though Billie was sick, she ‘was looking beautiful and she was dressed real nice!’ She remembered that Billie gazed at this little group of female musicians and then addressed the agent in a voice filled with maternal authority. ‘Now, you take care of my children!’ she said.